


The Jedi Way

by MagicMarker



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
Genre: Clone Wars, Crossover, Gen, Jedi, Jedi Knights, Jedi Training, Kyber Crystals, Order 66, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2017-06-02
Packaged: 2018-11-08 03:30:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11073153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagicMarker/pseuds/MagicMarker
Summary: Written per an ask box prompt: "I wish you would write a fic where Arwen is a Jedi." I started writing a little headcanon about her journey from Padawan to Knight and it turned into this little ficlet, ending in Order 66 at the close of the Clone Wars.





	The Jedi Way

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inheritanceofgeek](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inheritanceofgeek/gifts).



Arwen has just made Padawan status, assigned to Master Plo Koon. She’s quietly proud to have him as her Master, as she thinks the assignment says a lot about her. So she’s baffled when the first thing he does is send her to the creche. She’s not sure what a bunch of babies have to teach her about the Force, but she likes seeing the different ways the Force manifests in them already and learns to appreciate these natural differences. Plo Koon is pleased.

She travels all over the galaxy with him as they serve the Republic, sometimes picking up toddlers to bring back to the Jedi temple on Coruscant, sometimes quieting skirmishes on Republic worlds and supporting the local governments there. Sometimes Plo Koon sends her back to school to help with the Younglings. She likes this so well Master Yoda invites her to help lead some on their quest for their first Kyber crystal.

On the trip out to the Glittering Caves she notices Aragorn, a quiet kid who mostly keeps to himself. When he has something to say, though, he says it, usually leaving everyone around him in stitches. A good kid. As soon as the group enters the temple, Arwen reminds them that they can’t all stick together, like they’re usually told. The Force guides each person to the right crystal for them, they need only listen. Out of the five, four return within the hour.

Yoda tells her not to run in after Aragorn, but Arwen can’t help it - he’s just a kid! He doesn’t deserve to die swallowed up by the mountain. When she seeks him out in the Force, he glows bright and vivid and angry. Arwen turns a corner and he’s there, sobbing, cradling a small rodent in his arms. “Where’s your crystal?” she asks.

“He’s dying,” Aragorn cries, “Barkath got him with his slingshot.” He wipes his snotty nose on the back of his tunic sleeve. “I can feel it, all of it! It hurts!” She can see in the way his body’s hunched over, how he twinges and winces, that he’s not exaggerating.

How does Arwen explain to the kid that we all die, someday? That a Jedi doesn’t fear death because it’s just another part of life? She barely understands herself, and this poor boy’s connection to the Force has manifested in an empathy with creatures that’s so strong, she can practically see it. She shrugs off her outer robe and wraps it around Aragorn’s shoulders. “He’s becoming a part of the Force,” she says, “returning to it. I know it hurts, but we can help him.”

She sits behind him and gently folds his limbs into a position for meditation. “When we are calm and open up to the Force, we can see how it guides all living things, even in dying.” She reaches out through the Force, tries to calm his troubled aura, but that was always Master Adi Gallia’s forte, and she is so far from being a Master in that moment that it pains her. Yet she tries, and the sniffling slowly stops, even as the little ice-rat passes away in Aragorn’s lap. They unfold their limbs, stagger to their feet, and Arwen says, “It seems the Force had something else to teach you today. We can come back for your crystal another--”

“I have it,” he interrupts, shoving forth a shard no bigger than her thumbnail. Of course he does.

Arwen relates all this to Master Plo Koon, who laughs and shrugs and tells her that she did as well as he’d’ve done. She didn’t know communing with creatures like that was a Force skill, but she trusts her Master and puts even more effort into learning how to control her own skills. She specializes in Form V lightsaber combat and works with her Master to learn to control the environment, as he does, affecting groundquakes and gusting winds even as she acrobatically avoids them herself.

She is about to take the trials to become a Jedi Knight when full-scale war envelops the Republic. Master Plo Koon is sent to investigate Separatist activity on Geonosis and Arwen knows she can help him, she just knows that together they can shake those bugs right out of their underground caves and make them tell her what’s going on under that stinking desert of a planet. But he leaves her behind. “The Jedi Order must go on,” he says. “You must go on.” It crushes her.

He has not returned when she completes the trials and is officially knighted. Master Yoda and Master Ki Adi Mundi are kind but it’s not the same. Yet she knows this is just another important lesson. She can love her Master and still survive without him. This is the Jedi Way. When the new Padawan’s ceremony begins, she notices Aragorn front and center. Everyone with hair has been growing it out over the past year, and to distract herself, Arwen volunteers to help put in the Padawans’ new braids. Aragorn looks at her like she hangs the stars, even as she shears away a year’s worth of growth from the top and sides of his head. He’s a sweet boy.

War changes this. Only a few rotations after the yearly ceremonies and Arwen is named a general in the Clone Wars. She doesn’t take a Padawan, though she finds a way to work closely with Aragorn’s Master. Planning war feels like betrayal, even as she follows orders. Jedi are peace-keepers, and here they are fighting battles on planets that never asked for it. She convinces herself the cause is just. Yet the Republic is losing battle after battle, planets defect to the Separatist cause every day, and a small part of her wonders if the Force isn’t on the Jedi’s side, after all. She does not express this to Aragorn. Already she sees him becoming like durasteel, bulking up, mastering his Force communion to use local animals in battle - distracting droids, finding mines, even using them as impromptu transportation at times.

He is powerful, and gentle, and Arwen wonders what he would be like if he had not come of age in war.

They are on Hypori when the Order comes. Suddenly the bucketheads that had become her friends are firing at her, not past her, and Aragorn (who has grown four inches in the past month, she swears) is at her back, circling with her, deflecting blaster bolts. “They don’t want to do this,” he shouts. “You don’t want to do this!” But they don’t stop, or can’t, and the blaster fire keeps coming, and the white armor keeps advancing, and Aragorn’s master, some fifty metres away, takes a bolt to the back and crumples like a bag of jobafruit.

A laser bolt hits Aragorn in the shoulder and he falls to the ground more from sorrow than injury. She feels his loss too keenly; deep inside her, somehow Arwen knows that her master is gone too. Later she will seek him out in the Force and find nothing. But the Jedi Order must go on. She must go on. So she hauls Aragorn back to his feet and summons every ounce of strength inside her to whip up a sandstorm between them and the advancing clone troopers. “If you want him,” she bellows at them, “come and claim him!” But she knows the metals in the sand will screw up their sensors, and the dust will clog their air intakes.

They retreat to a waiting X-wing and zoom away. Aragorn pants with the pain of the entire world below them, and Arwen grits her teeth and hopes the astromech gets the hyperspace calculations done before the Republic ships notice her. She has a bad feeling that Coruscant is not the place to go, so she heads home to Arda-2 which, as far as she knows, is still neutral. They’ll be able to find out what’s happening from there. As the astromech screeches and the stars start to stream past, she lays back in the pilot seat and cries.

Aragorn joins her some time later, easing into the navigator’s chair and poking at the scorch marks on his shoulder. He is back to his quiet self, the quiet she met at the Glittering Caves.

“Do you remember when we first met?” she asks, wry smile quirking her lips.

“I thought I had wandered into a dream,” he answers, always the flirt with her even as his eyes display his sorrow. After a beat, he nods more seriously. “Master Koth encouraged me to develop my skills. It was fun getting Loth-cats to disable scanner droids, or riding on the backs of those skywhales, but now...” He picks at his sleeve, not meeting her eyes. “They killed every Jedi on that planet, Arwen. And I felt it, every single one.” He clears his throat to avoid tears, a strangled sound that rends Arwen’s heart. “What do we do now?”

“I’m not sure,” she admits. Something dark is acting on the galaxy, and it’s bigger than Hypori, she knows. But her master’s voice comes to her as if whispering in her ear, and she echoes him.

“We go on. We must go on. It’s the Jedi way.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed reading! Let me know via kudos or comments, or come find me [here on tumblr](http://cersei-the-truth-bombardier.tumblr.com). Thanks so much!


End file.
